A ringlet butterfly at rest on a plant growing by a quiet country lane. It’s lost quite a big segment of its wing. Perhaps it’s a male which has been fighting with other males, or possibly it managed to avoid an even worse fate in an encounter with a hungry bird.
Views when standing on the sea front at Dawlish Warren. Turning to the right, the distinctive sandstone arch of the Red Rock is only a few minutes walk away. in the farther distance, made pale by atmospheric haze, more coastal cliffs.
Turn to the right for the long stretch of Dawlish Warren beach with its row of groynes, and Exmouth beyond on the far side of the Exe estuary.
The same patch of vegetation overhanging the Exe at Exeter which has already featured in two recent posts for insects it had attracted. Among the other plants, hemp agrimony was flowering, with the flowers attracting three different butterfly species which I could picture without needing to move.
There was a red admiral, a small copper and a hedge brown.
Cormorants resting on the buoys marking a weir just downstream of the Quay at Exeter. In the summer, there’s just a handful of them, probably young birds.
Come winter, the same perches are crowded, as can be seen by the markers the birds leave behind.
A comma butterfly which found a resting place on the same patch of riverside leaves by the Exe as the damselflies featured a couple of days ago.
Two bird families near the jetty at Topsham on the River Exe. The black swans, native to Australia, are from a long-established colony at Dawlish along the coast. They may be an adult pair and their cygnets from the previous year, now almost full grown/
The shelduck ducklings were more recently hatched. Unusually, they were being cared for by both parents, and seemed to have established a routine of spending the nights crowded up in a heap just above the high tide mark of the jetty.